


The Genesis of Julia

by Rizandace



Series: Immortality AU [4]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Character Study, F/F, M/M, Multi, The Old Guard AU, Violence
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-07
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-16 09:54:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29205444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rizandace/pseuds/Rizandace
Summary: Short snippets on the theme of Julia: her origins, her relationships with her family, her many adventures. Set in the universe ofA Comet Pulled From Orbit, contains major spoilers for that story.
Relationships: Eliot Waugh & Julia Wicker, Margo Hanson/Julia Wicker, Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Series: Immortality AU [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2105883
Comments: 38
Kudos: 30





	1. On Acrobatics

She decides, while watching the 1984 Summer Olympics one lazy day, a magically cool glass of lemonade on the table beside her as she lounges back into their comfiest armchair, to master gymnastics. The decision is made more or less on a whim; this is how Julia decides how to spend a great deal of her infinite life minutes, truthfully. She’s organized and meticulous once she knows her goal, but when it comes to _finding_ said goal, it’s all about what strikes her fancy.

Lately, for Penny-Adiyodi-is-dead reasons, nothing much has been striking her fancy. But she can’t sit around moping, she can’t fret over Kady, she can’t walk on tip-toe every time she talks to Q on the phone, wondering if a visit is going to set El off or if he’ll be happy to see them. It’s all too much, and it’s been a decade.

Life’s too short. Or, as the case may be, too long.

So Julia goes to the library and comes back with a comically oversized stack of books, which is how she starts all her research, and she reads up on the topic for a week or two before she attempts a single stretch on her own. Next, she makes Margo convert the second bedroom in their current apartment into a gym suited to her particular goals, complete with mirrors along one wall, a balance beam, a vault, and various other pieces of equipment that Julia has read about and is excited to use. They’re on the top floor, but they’ve got magic protecting the downstairs neighbors from the sound of Julia prancing around on the newly installed floor mats.

(“You’re fucking lucky I love you,” Margo says on Julia’s first day of practice on the balance beam, leaning against the door jamb and smacking a piece of gum between her lips as she surveys the new room in its final form.

“For so many reasons, dearest,” Julia replies.)

She quickly learns, renting old videos of past Olympic games and finding more and more research to imbibe, that there are all sorts of different forms of the sport, and she’s briefly overwhelmed by the desire to master every different aspect as quickly as she can. But as is the case whenever she starts to learn a new skill, she quickly settles into a groove, and finds the thing about it she actually likes.

It’s not even gymnastics, really. Or not _all_ gymnastics. It’s the defying of gravity, the contortion, the slow twisting and graceful movements that look almost like swimming, or dancing, through the air. A lot of gymnastics isn’t really about that. It’s quick and sharp and impressive, and Julia wants to know this too, but after her first couple of months of daily practice, she decides that _gymnast_ isn’t precisely her target identity any longer.

When she tells Margo this, her eyes roll back into her head and she sighs at the ceiling as if imploring a higher power for patience. “I installed mirrors on the wall and we’ve _barely_ used it to watch ourselves have sex, Julie. And now you’re saying—”

“I want to be an acrobat,” she interrupts, choosing to ignore the fact that they’d had quite a satisfying interlude in front of said mirrors only that morning. When Margo’s bored, she always thinks they’re not having enough sex.

“Like in the circus?” Margo says. And then, even though she already knows the answer, she asks: “ _why_? You could just magic yourself into whatever sort of contortionist flips your heart desires. Ask El to float you up in the air and you can twirl around on your way back down. Hell, _I_ could probably manage lifting you up to the ceiling, if it came to that.”

“I want to know how it works,” Julia says. “I want my body to know how it works.”

Julia does master quite a few basic skills, but a couple years into this fixation, she knows it’s not something she’ll ever take all the way to the top. Like how she’d mastered the piano back in the ‘30s and ‘40s (nineteenth century), but had given up on her opera singing after a couple of months. Or how she’d settled for conversational in Vietnamese, but still keeps up on her flawless, fluent Tamil. She can’t know everything, and most of the time the thought doesn’t even rankle.

But pushing her body to new limits, learning new ways to test her balance and her core strength and her fortitude... it did what it was supposed to do. It made her feel like she had a future to plan for again. A different future, grimmer and darker and less ideally what she wanted it to be, without Penny there, but… a future.

She doesn’t join a circus or decide to go for a professional career as a gymnast. She finds flipping through the air to be overall a quite disorienting prospect, and it takes her months to stop catching herself on the tumbles using magic, to trust her instincts and let totally organic processes cushion her fall.

(She lets Margo kiss the places on her body where bruises might have formed, were she the kind of person who got bruises, and even when her interest wanes away from daily practice, they keep the mirrors up in the spare room.)

Eventually, some of it even comes in handy. When they start taking jobs again, Julia finds herself getting hurt less often, falling more gracefully, quicker to recover after getting hit. It makes her a newly lethal asset on the battlefield, matched perhaps only by Q in terms of sheer fluid, dynamic precision. She’d have to do a study, compare notes, but she thinks perhaps their overall efficiency in battle has improved as a consequence of her new skill, and she even cons some of the others into practicing on a balance beam with her, every once in a while.

It’s hard, sometimes, not to think about Penny, about _grieving_ Penny, when she brushes off her back-handspring skills. The period of her life when she learned how to move her body in exactly this way, is also the period of her life when she was so sad, so terribly, impossibly sad, all the time, every single day, that she felt like someone had tied a weight to her ankle, slowing her down, tying her to the ground with oppressive, insistent agony.

But when they get Penny back, it means she gets to bully him into handstand practice during their workouts together, and the new memories help to contextualize the old. Not to erase them, but to blend them together, create a new truth wherein Julia mourned for the brother-in-arms she had lost, and then got to experience the miracle of his return.

And, anyway. It’s not like she learned how to be an acrobat _because_ Penny died. She probably would have gotten around to it eventually, in any case.

Learning this skill, for Julia, wasn’t about getting better at fighting or becoming a more physically fit person. The thing that gripped her about it most of all was the way it forced her to know her body, to hone her skill with it, to trust in instincts over intellect. She’s never relied much on her body, has always trusted her mind to get her where she needed to go. But Julia has never liked having weaknesses. She’ll have to make Q teach her Judo, next.


	2. On Baking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a little something focused on El and Julia. Hope you enjoy!

Julia was not good in the kitchen.

Or, alternatively, Julia was capable of making most any meal she set her mind to, and had made some truly delightful culinary treats in her day, but she didn’t _like_ it. She couldn’t have said why, exactly. Over the years she’d cultivated many skills, and she loved the meticulous process of becoming an expert in something new.

But from the very beginning of her _first_ life, she found the preparation of food to be nothing more than a mildly inconvenient chore. She’d do her share, but she had a reputation among her first family for shirking off meal preparation if there was any other way she could make herself useful. As one of the only magic users available in those days, she was able to use her burgeoning reputation as a healer and general problem-solver, to get out of her fair share of cooking.

But over time, there grew to be an exception, and it had nothing to do with the food itself, but instead, with El.

El kept them in baked goods and in charmingly varied meals using fresh ingredients from all over the world. Whenever their family was apart, whether it be for separate vacations, or different assignments during a job, Julia badly missed the comfort of El’s home cooking, and she never felt entirely at home until he was the one preparing her food for her again.

And baking specifically… that was for them. J and El, in every permutation, over the centuries, whenever El was baking bread or desserts or anything else, Julia was his right hand woman. 

She still had fond memories of the first time they made bread together, unleavened and simple, using an odd blend of supplies El had taken from his distant homeland, packed away in the stasis of an alternate dimension, and things pulled from the land surrounding them. It was merely something basic and easy to store, so they could stock up on supplies before they began a journey south. They were heading out from the place where El and Q and M and first found her and added her to the family, and journeying towards a place M had never seen before but had long dreamed of: the land of her mother’s people. Without a Traveler to hand, they’d be making the trek using whatever modes of transportation they could find. A lot of walking, mainly, and that meant preparing for long travel.

During that first time, they were still learning each other’s languages. Conversations were simple and clumsy, but El smiled at her when she bent to help, and asked her questions about how her people prepared food for long journeys, and answered questions of his own in turn. It had been one of the first times, maybe the _very_ first, that the two had spent any uninterrupted time alone with one another. M and Q had been off making other preparations for their journey, checking over weapons of strange construction that she did not know the names for, reorganizing packs for easy access to certain essential items.

So there was a rhythm to it. To this form of communication, close together in front of a fire, passing things across to one another, making suggestions, seeing the work of their hands bear fruit. And as their journey commenced, El often asked her to assist him at the fireside as he prepared an evening meal. It felt so very different from working with her family back home, but also similar, in the camaraderie it provided, the closeness of hard work and the reward of good food at the end of it. She didn’t avoid the chore when she was doing it with El; his obvious pleasure in the task brought her a measure of joy she’d never quite known in this way.

Julia remembered baking cookies with El in a tiny little kitchen in the midwest somewhere, circa 1950. She remembered learning to make barbari in the middle east some time in the fifteenth century, excited for once to be starting from the same level of expertise as El. Just as a desire for expertise illuded her in the kitchen, so too did her normal competitive streak: she was content to enjoy El’s final result when he produced something far above what she herself was capable of making. She made mantou in China in the nineteenth century, and Margo and Q and Pen and Kady gleefully taste-tested her efforts. They came up with their own recipe for chocolate chip pumpkin bread in the months after Penny’s return from Fillory and made loaf after loaf, in those days when El couldn’t stand to sit still, needed to keep his hands busy, all of them vibrating out of their skulls with glee and relief and the awkward moments when they forgot they didn’t have to be sad anymore. Pumpkin had always been a favorite of Penny’s, so they made fucking pumpkin bread until the very smell made them all nauseated, their clothing spattered with flour, chocolate chips scattered across the counter from ripped plastic bags.

Julia wasn’t an expert in this, and for whatever reason, of all the skills she’d learned over the years, she intentionally kept herself from _becoming_ an expert. She liked the amatuer enjoyment she got from the task, the social activity it always turned into, whenever she and El started with a flat surface and some raw ingredients, and made something for the family to enjoy.

In many ways, she wasn’t sure what her relationship with El would even look like, if he hadn’t called her over to the fire that day, to offer her a place in his domain. They thought so differently about things, approached the world from such wildly different perspectives. Julia’s curiosity got them into trouble sometimes, while El’s indifference over the bigger questions in life could drive Julia to distraction. They clashed, at least in the early days, over so many things, especially over Margo, over the shifting relationship dynamics that were inevitable when adding a new person into a family already centuries old. They bickered over which jobs to take, and which to ignore. It had taken longer than any of them cared to remember, to work out their clashing domains during combat, El constantly picking off J’s targets in the heat of battle, J encroaching into space El was determined to protect.

But Julia knew how to knead dough because El had taught her to knead dough, and that right there was a bond nothing would ever break.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come say hi on tumblr @Nellie-Elizabeth!


	3. On Consequences

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I always knew I wanted to dive into this story from _A Comet Pulled From Orbit_ a bit more! Hope you... enjoy? Is that the right word for this?
> 
> Warnings for some gore, specifically near-decapitation.

_“What’s the Samurai incident of 1578?” Alice asked._

_Julia raised a hand towards her throat, and made an indelicate motion with her hand, like an axe chopping down. Her tongue stuck out against her bottom lip. “I got distracted in a fight. Eliot’s head nearly came off. Like. Really nearly.”_

_Alice’s stomach turned over._

_“El was in a bad way; it took him… a while to wake up. Q was—um.” She paused, swallowing, and then shook her head. “Sorry, god, I forgot I don’t think about this for a reason. It’s just… Q, waiting for him, wasn’t—well, El was fine, he was fine, it all worked out, but Q didn’t take it well. He was too scared to be angry with me in the moment, but afterwards… well, I thought he was going to kill me, and I’m not speaking metaphorically. And then he spent the next couple of years refusing to talk to me, or practically even be in the same room with me, and it... wasn’t the best.”_

— _ A Comet Pulled From Orbit _ , Chapter Five

*****

Sometimes, Julia made mistakes. It happened to all of them. It was inevitable. She’d received injuries, watched her friends receive injuries, more frequently than she wanted to admit, all because of a hesitation in a reflex, a distraction across the field of battle.

Maybe they all had a bit of a problem, taking their inherent abilities for granted. If you were willing to put up with a trivial injury in the quest of your goal, if letting your arm get sliced or a fist slam into your sternum would get you what you wanted faster, easier, then what did it matter? It wasn’t _permanent_. It could never be permanent.

But she’d been covering El. It had been her job to cover El. If it had been anything else, if El had been nicked in the thigh, or received a dashing cut across a cheekbone, it wouldn’t have mattered. It wouldn’t have _mattered_ , it was only dumb luck. They got hurt sometimes, they _died_ sometimes, and it wasn’t… it couldn’t...

She approached, queasy, unable to look at El’s glassy, blank eyes. He’d wake up, because that was what they did. They always woke up. She crouched down beside El, beside Q, who was cradling him in his arms, and reached forward to put a hand on Q’s shoulder.

Q flinched away from her, pulling El’s head under his chin, a low moan of distress escaping from his throat. His grip was protective, possessive, like he was worried Julia meant El harm. If he was even aware it was Julia. He didn’t seem to be aware of much of anything, really, beyond the obvious reality that El’s heart wasn’t beating. He hadn’t said anything, when he’d run over in the aftermath of the fight and seen El dead on the ground. Unfortunately for all of them, it wasn’t the first time they’d had to watch one of their own die. But the _gore_ , the violence, the skin of El’s neck holding his head on by an _inch_ , the blood soaking into the dirt. It _felt_ final, it felt different. Felt like a grotesque impossibility, that any spark of life could reinhabit a body so definitively destroyed.

Q had dropped wordlessly to his knees, and reached up through the carnage to tip El’s head back onto his neck, holding the clean-cut edges of the skin together, waiting for magic to sew him back into life. He’d pulled El’s insensate corpse up into his lap, right there in the open air with the dead of their enemies still around them, and he’d waited.

That had been nearly an hour ago.

“You don’t want to touch them right now,” Margo said, coming up and putting a hand on Julia’s shoulder, guiding her away.

“But—”

“He doesn’t like people to touch him when he's dead,” Margo said, like she was delivering prepared instructions. Julia wondered if she meant Q didn’t like it, or El. She’d never seen them quite like this before, but Margo had centuries of time with them that Julia did not. She shuddered, wondering what Margo was remembering right now.

“I just—”

“You can’t fix this.”

Margo’s voice was hollow with grief, and when Julia turned to look at her, she saw the restraint, the effort it was taking her not to be there, not to have her hands on El as well, waiting for the bloom of life to return.

“I’m so sorry—”

“Stop,” Penny said, appearing on her other side. “It’ll be okay. Or… or it won’t be, we just have to...”

The three of them stood several yards off, staring at the tableau of El’s unmoving form, Q trembling and breathing harshly with his head buried in El’s hair. There was nothing to say, nothing to do, and that was Julia’s least favorite thing in the world. She’d do anything to fix this, anything for El to wake up, but there was no action she could take.

She’d been distracted for one second, had turned her head at just the wrong moment, and El, who had been focused on long-distance defense spells to keep the fight contained, had paid the price.

She’d heard it. _Heard_ the slice of the metal through flesh and sinew, the aborted shout, cut off, _literally_ , as El fell in a crumpled heap to the ground. She hadn’t even been able to run to him, to react in any way other than an outraged shout and a redoubling of her own efforts. She had to clear their enemies, she had to keep them off of El for when he woke up, disoriented on the ground…

And now here they were, and the past hour had felt longer than the centuries she’d been alive. If she’d only been paying attention, if she’d…

When El finally did wake up, he rolled his face into the crook of Q’s neck, murmuring words of reassurance to him before he’d even regained full consciousness. At this point, Margo and Penny ran to the two of them, allowed to approach, allowed to touch, but Julia didn’t want to test it, was afraid of what Q might do if she tried. She was frozen, still locked in the horror of inaction, that split second that could have ripped her entire life apart.

She watched Margo kiss El on the lips, and then she leaned towards Q, who was too distracted to notice what anyone else was doing, pecking him on the cheek. Penny copied her, and El leaned weakly between the three people crowded around him, borrowing further into Q even as he tilted his head into the kiss Penny offered, reaching a hand out to tangle it with Margo’s. And then… El looked up, saw Julia standing there, yards away.

Their eyes met, and everything passed between them. Remorse, anger, forgiveness, all done away in the blink of an eye. El knew she’d die for him if it came to that. He also knew that it wasn’t always up to them, how it all happened. There were things, as much as Julia hated it, that would always be out of her control.

Today, the consequences for her moment of distraction were survivable. She hadn’t lost a loved one. That consequence, that outcome for the day, was so horrific and unthinkable that she couldn’t dwell on it, now that the danger had passed, now that El was awake and petting a hand through Q’s hair, getting to his feet like nothing had happened.

But there was a consequence. It _had_ happened. She had El’s forgiveness, like she’d known she would, but what about Q? The loss of Q’s trust and affection, this dear friend, brother of her soul, was not something she knew how to bear.

She tried, that night, to talk to him. Against all advice from the others, she tried.

Q looked at her ever so briefly, eyes bloodshot and face still pinched and pale. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, then closed it and swallowed, shaking his head.

“Give him some time,” El said, giving her a smile and a tilt of the head. “All will be well.”

It was maybe the greatest gift their lives had to offer them, that Julia believed this might be true. It would take time, but El was alive, the long column of his neck unblemished, a gaping future of darkness and regret closed up along with his skin. And because of this, she knew El spoke the truth. One day, some day, eventually, all would be well.


End file.
